This royal icing recipe for use in your decorative sugar cookies is the easiest royal icing recipe to follow and yields impressive results. Your sugar cookies are about to impress! This is a very basic recipe that I think is the easiest to use and will consistently turn out.
I love making sugar cookies for every holiday. I use this sugar cookie recipe. When gifting them, I turn to this easy royal icing recipe to decorate them with impressive results. Royal icing tends to be thinner than traditional powdered sugar icing or buttercream icing and is best when you want to use more than one color or do more intricate designs on your cookies.
Royal icing sometimes gets a bad rap as being difficult to work with, but once you use it a few times, you may prefer the fancy, intricate designs you can do with it. Royal icing sets harder than traditional buttercream icing and your designs will harden and keep their shape.
To successfully use royal icing, follow the direction below. Always reserve some of the thicker frosting before thinning out the rest of your batch. The thicker frosting is what you will use to pipe the boarder of your cookie design. I like to use Wilton piping bags and tips, but you could also use a sandwich bag if you’re in a pinch. If you think you will use this technique more than once though, I highly recommend buying the piping bags. They come in packs of 100 and make decorating so much easier. Place a piping tip in the bag, or just snip off the very end of the bag, and pipe with whatever color you are using for your design. Let that sit. Usually people say to let it sit for 4 hours, but I am impatient and typically only wait 15-20 minutes!
After piping the boarder, use your thinner “flood” color to fill in the space within the boarders. You may need to use a toothpick to smooth it out a bit, don’t worry it will settle and look great! If you want to swirl your flood colors together to make a design (like in the heart cookie picture above), do not let the flood frosting set. Frost with the initial color and go right back in with whatever color you are using to make the swirl pattern. Pipe that on top of the first flood color and use a toothpick to swirl the colors together.
After frosting, let the cookies sit out for 4-6 hours so that the frosting hardens. It will harden into a silky shell. Cookies can then be packed or even frozen to enjoy later.
The Easiest Royal Icing Recipe
Ingredients
- 4 cups Powdered Sugar
- 4 tbsp meringue powder
- 1/4 cup water slowly add water to desired consistency
- 1 tsp Vanilla
- 1 tsp Almond Extract optional
Instructions
Step 1
- Add powdered sugar, meringue powder, extracts and roughly 5-6 tbsp water to stand mixer. Mix slowly on medium speed, increasing to high until mixture forms stiff peaks. You will want the frosting to be the consistency of paste.
Step 2
- After mixing, divide out any frosting that you want to add food coloring to and mix in coloring. Reserve this thick icing to pipe borders.
Step 3
- The remaining frosting can be "thinned" down. Slowly add 1 tsp at a time to thin frosting down. This is called "flood" frosting that will be piped onto the cookie after the border is piped. It can also be used for decorative elements within the cookie.
Step 4
- Frosting can be poured into a piping bag. I like to use Wilton decorative tips, but if you do not have any tips, you can always cut a small corner of the bag off. Start with a small cut and make it bigger if you want a thicker flood or piping. Start by piping any borders of the design with the thicker frosting and then flood with the thinner frosting. The flood icing should smooth out to fill the space within the border, but if it doesn't, you can use a toothpick to smooth it over.
Step 5
- Allow cookies and frosting to dry, preferrable for 4-6 hours before stacking or adding a secondary design. Cookies and frosting will freeze for at least 2 months. Just remove from freezer, thaw and enjoy!
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